Plot Options#

scqubits implements a number of routines for plotting a variety of viewgraphs, such as one-dimensional and two-dimensional qubit wavefunctions, plots of energy spectra as a function of an external parameter and more. These plot functions and methods take specific mandatory arguments which differ from case to case. In addition, each routine accepts a set of keyword arguments **kwargs which are used

for setting graphics options affecting the format of the plot, and
for prompting graphical output to be written to a file.

Supported options#

The options supported by scqubits plotting routines fall into a few groups. First, any option that can be set on the side of Matplotlib via Axes.set_xxx(...) is accessible through the keyword xxx. For example, to employ Axes.set_xlim(0,10) one provides the keyword argument xlim=(0,10) to the scqubits plot function of interest. The second set of options is specific to scqubits. The most common Matplotlib options and the custom scqubits options are summarized here:

keyword	Description
`xlim`: (float,float)	Lower/upper bounds for x axis
`ylim`: (float,float)	Lower/upper bounds for y axis
`ymax`: float	Only set upper bound on y axis
`xlabel`: str	Label text for x axis
`ylabel`: str	Label text for y axis
`title`: str	Title for plot
`figsize`: (float, float)	Figure size in inches
`fig_ax`: (Figure, Axes)	If provided, plot is added to existing objects
`filename`: str	If provided, plot is written to file

A number of additional options falling in the Axes.set_xxx(...) category is available; consult the matplotlib.axes.Axes API documentation to see the complete list.

Matplotlib’s option grid is also supported and appropriately handled by scqubits. An argument that reads grid=xxx which is passed to an scqubits plotting command, is internally processed as Axes.grid(**xxx), if the xxx is a python dictionary, or as Axes.grid(xxx) otherwise.

There are also some plotting options that scqubits plotting routines directly pass to the appropriate Matplotlib plotting commands (such as plot or imshow). In the case of standard x vs y types of plots, these include:

keyword	Description
`alpha`: float or None	Set the alpha value used for blending
`linestyle`: str	Set linestyle from {‘-’, ‘–’, ‘-.’, ‘:’, ‘’, …}
`linewidth`: float	Set the linewidth in points
`marker`: str	Marker style
`markersize`: str	Markersize in points

scqubits plotting routines that internally use Matplotlib’s imshow command (such as ZeroPi.plot_wavefunction for example) support

keyword	Description
`interpolation`: str	Types of interpolation such (e.g. “spline16”, “bilinear”, etc.)

For a more detailed description of some of the above options, see Matplotlib’s documentation.

Returns of plot functions#

Every scqubit routine for plotting returns a tuple (Figure, Axes) of Matplotlib objects. These can be used for further processing by the user. In Jupyter, lines calling plot routines can be ended with a ; to avoid the text output indicating the returned objects.